1. Field
This application relates to evaluation of remote user attributes in a social networking environment.
2. Description of Related Art
Socializing on the Internet is a common activity in today's wired society. Many people including both children and adults participate in some form of online social networking. Social networking may take the form of massively multiplayer online game, social websites such as LinkedIn®, Facebook®, and MySpace®, or any public site where there are interactions among users. Such sites may include sites relating to dating, blogging, and video sharing.
Regardless of the form of social networking, most sites or systems allow users to sign up as members. The identities of the members are often verified using credit cards or other methods involving third-party authenticators using personal confidential information provided by respective users. With or without some form of third-party verification, a user's personal characteristics may not be verified, therefore enabling some users to falsely portray their own personal characteristics, for example, age, gender, geographic location, occupation, education, or group membership. Additionally, most social networking sites that cater to children lack any form of requirement for identification. Thus, an adult may falsely portray himself as a minor on such websites. This example exemplifies the inherent danger of online networking, especially for children. In other circumstances, false portrayals may be more annoying than dangerous, but nonetheless tend to undermine and devalue the worth of online social networks. This is especially true of dating or other networks in which online activity may serve as a prelude to an in-person relationship. At the same, use of third-party authentication with personal confidential information, besides not enabling verification of all personal attributes, may not be economically practicable, because many users are justifiably reluctant to submit personal confidential information to administrators of social networking sites.
As social networking web sites, virtual worlds, dating web sites, and other network based applications increasingly serve as a proxy for face to face human interaction, the importance of evaluating the accuracy of personal attributes ascribed to remote users has dramatically increased. As unthinkable as it is for a parent to imagine that a 50 year old man might be posing as a 14 year old girl in order to interact with children, such is the reality of social networking. At the same time, there is a demand for social networking sites that allow members to join without providing verified or verifiable personal information, because members desire to minimize risks of identity theft that may result from freely providing too much personal information, or because verification costs raise unacceptable barriers to entry. Existing technology fails to provide verification or a risk profile that to enable persons accessing a social network to determine the likelihood that people they are interacting with actually have claimed personal attributes, such as, for example, the claimed age, hair color, eye color, height, weight, gender, profession and geographical location.